Even the author’s unexceptional first novel seems of interest after bits of it
were suppressed

Why is it that things you are not meant to read acquire such great interest by that very fact? The attraction is so powerful that only a strong taboo can overcome it. So, if you walk into a room where an unfinished letter lies on the bureau, you immediately become an iron-filing drawn to its magnetism. But then the taboo takes over, switching your polarity, as it were, and repelling your eyes from the private text.

At least, I think that’s what happens. Some uncomplicated souls might dive straight for the letter and devour it as a dog bolts down a piece of liver left on the kitchen table. Even the dog, though, feels a bit sick afterwards.

Which of the Ten Commandments is breached by reading someone else’s letter? I’m not sure. Is it an act of theft, false-witness, covetousness? It’s hard to fit in. Yet one thing is sure. No good will come of it. It’s like cannibalism.

This very strong appetite for forbidden words might explain why Reading University has paid getting on for a million pounds for six exercise-books containing the drafts for Murphy, the first novel by Samuel Beckett. They’re on show for a surprisingly short time tomorrow, from half past 12 to 7pm at the university’s Museum of English Rural Life – the last place you might expect, since Beckett was Franco-Hibernian and urban.

Few people have read Murphy. I haven’t read it. You haven’t read it, or if you have, I won’t need to apologise to many people. “It is not his greatest work,” someone quoted John Pilling as saying, and he has given his life to Beckett studies. Granted, Murphy details the route of the No 11 bus in 1935, which is surprisingly similar to the route of the No 11 bus today. But the interest of the manuscript (the “hand-written manuscript” as Reading University rather oddly describes it, on the model perhaps of hand-cut chips) comes from the pages that have been crossed out. We weren’t meant to read those.

Dead poets can’t stop a new generation fishing about in their discarded drafts. Natalie Abrahami, who directed this year’s much praised Young Vic production of Happy Days (the one with a woman progressively buried deeper in the sand), went through Beckett’s rejected versions in order to shape her own interpretation.

It’s enough to make a writer reach for a box of matches. Only with the help of Brother Fire (“beautiful and cheerful, robust and strong”) can a responsible writer stop the scrabbling critics of the future from publishing every syllable of deliberately rejected composition. Beckett would see the funny side of it.

He had, the story goes, been acting as an amanuensis to James Joyce, who dictated bits of Finnegans Wake to him. One day in mid flow there was a knock on the door. Later when he asked Beckett to read back the new work, Joyce inquired: “What’s that 'Come in’?” “You said it,” Beckett answered. Joyce thought for a moment then said: “Let it stand.”

The trouble is that Finnegans Wake doesn’t contain the sentence “Come in.” An ingenious man called Hugh Staples, having looked all through the book carefully, concluded in 1971 that Joyce’s exclamation had not been, “Come in,” but, “What is that?” (223.1-11). This he confirmed to his own satisfaction by comparing the book to an earlier draft. So even anecdotes about writers’ drafts are amended with the aid of writers’ drafts.

The hardest thing in the world is to accept that a writer was perfectly correct in striking out whole passages of work. Samuel Johnson had it right when he applied to authors in general the advice of a college tutor: “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

Little did he suspect that this is the very way to make the passage deliciously intriguing. There’s a lovely edition of The Waste Land which reproduces Eliot’s typescript (or “type-written typescript” as Reading University might call it) with Ezra Pound’s amendments. Now Pound might have been a mad fascist, but he knew a thing or two about poetry. “Verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it,” he wrote next to a cancelled line about the typist who “prepares the room and sets the room to rights” before the visit of that “young man carbuncular” (in place of “a youth of twenty-one, spotted about the face”). Out went the kimono and the window seat (“Not in that lodging house,” wrote Pound in the margin). Out went lines wholesale later, before Phlebas the Phoenician’s posthumous entry. And Pound was right to cut to the quick.

Yet it’s fun to pore over the poem and see what might have been, for the worse. Perhaps we’d lose patience were it the length of Finnegans Wake, before or after revision. But future generations will never know the thrill of drafts struck-out in pencil, now that the delete key sends them full fathom five down the memory hole.